Graham Goes Full Trump Loyalist

I had missed this. But it’s a significant development. Sen. Lindsey Graham has oscillated between being a fierce Trump critic to being increasingly supportive of the President. But he now seems to have moved firmly into the Trump loyalist camp.

I base that on a number of recent events but particularly on these two tweets from Friday.

It’s long past time for a Special Counsel to investigate Clinton email scandal, Uranium One, role of Fusion GPS, and FBI and DOJ bias during 2016 campaign.

Note here the things that Graham is including in his call. They range from things that are fairly unreasonable or without significant merit to things that are totally crazy. He is asking for a Special Counsel to reinvestigate Clinton’s private server, the Uranium One story, which is completely ludicrous, and anti-GOP bias at the FBI, which is not only factually nonsensical but seems intended to lay the groundwork for ideological purges of the primary national law enforcement agency which already has a very Republican-leaning political culture.

While Graham has many flaws, he’s also been capable of a significant amount of heterodoxy and even an amount of dissension from party political positions, if perhaps often for effect or positioning. Why he would now swing so hard and so totally in a Trumpite direction is, frankly, not clear to me. He’s up for reelection again in 2020, which is a ways off. Few Republican senators show much willingness to get seriously on to the President’s bad side. But this is way, way beyond what is necessary for that. There’s some story here. I don’t know what it is. We don’t know that it’s nefarious. But this is something that would be very helpful to have explained.